Enemies whose attacks are on cooldown while they pick up the shards will just start moonwalking at mach10 in whatever direction they originally faced.

What I can see is that damage, defense, health and speed scales with the amount of shards in those enemies. Could we cut the defense scaling off of those? xD
I got one-tapped by a T2 lichen after it got fed 5 shards. This does have potential to make arcade more interesting.

1. Found a new room with a broken party button.
2. Weird spike-wisp interaction. Seems like it doesn't pick up spikes unless the player is fairly close, which looks weird. It seems to get stuck on fallen spikes. It's movement axis flipped from up/down to left/right, and it followed me briefly, moving in a diagonal direction.
3. Menders with lots of spikes (i got 6 on one) have significantly shorter dashes/evades. They're so stunted that it's almost easier to reach them when they have spikes.

For some non-bug feedback, it seems like the difference in buffs between 1 spike and 2 spikes is much larger than the difference between 1 spike and no spikes. I'd think that there should be a "spike" in strength at 1 spike, and then diminishing returns for all future spikes.

Wisps and shankles shouldn't be able to pick those shards up (as well as any monsters that have set pathing). The AI immediately floats towards where there are crystals and then proceeds to tweak out in place before speeding up in a set/random direction or being stuck in place.

Please add a limit of the incremental stat increases on monsters. There's a huge potential for griefing and accidentally 'overfeeding' an enemy with crystals making them very hard to deal with.

Other than that, could we have the aurora on all levels for testing? I'd like to personally see how goofy the animations can get. A good chunk of levels that are treated as 'construct' levels (jigsaw valley being an example) spawn monster gamble boxes, allowing for any monster to pick those crystals up.

Firstly, really liking the extra difficulty created by the spikes. Whilst they are just stat increases, allowing movement speed and attack speed to go up makes an enemy with 2-3+ crystals a serious threat, meaning you have to change your targets approrpiately. It does feel like it would punish highly defensive play, which has never been much of an aspect of SK's combat imo but could further hurt loadouts that don't focus on aggressive attacking boosts.

Now, the main reason I am posting! When I did a run from Tier 3, I did two compounds in Stratum 6. I noticed notably higher spawn rates of spikes in rooms with scarabs (likely also true with mini slimes, but I did not see if that's true for certain), and just higher spawn rates overall. This leads me to believe the spawn of spikes is based on number of enemies, which makes sense. It did however feel a bit weird when I then did an Arena floor after that spawned less, despite those floors being all about a heavy combat based challenge. The increased number of spikes on Compounds also meant I saw a lot more enemies with 2-3 spikes at once, which very much increased the difficulty.

This did not feel great, as these enemies often came from the other side of rooms where I did not have time to stop them gaining those spikes, though this may be either a skill issue on my part or just simply the rewards for spikes being rather minimal at the moment and thus I didn't want to deal with added difficulty. I feel a way to fix this annoyance is to not have mini-enemies count towards spike spawn rates with no other changes needed.

I think the idea has potential.
But to me, after trying Twins Shadow Lair with the Mysterious Spikes. It was unrealistic.

My current complaint about this is the speed buff the spike gives to the mob. The % should be around +10% per spike. Not 100% per one.
Only just 3, and the Mecha Knight zoomed into my face with unbelievable speed. Oiler was able to get close to me and deal unavoidable damage.

I also would suggest a hard cap because things got out of hand pretty quickly and were unavoidable.

A small note: But I don't think player-allied mecha knights or similar allied NPC AI should run toward spike since they cannot use them.

Spike related:
- Similar to Tapproot's point, Shankles also change their axis. On my end, it seems to have changed paths due to colliding with another Monster that had a spike embedded. Would recommend that they still stick to the same axis and only move faster.
- Roarmulus Twins/Red Roarmulus Twins being affected and changing the pace for old and new players. Although welcomed by some Vets, this can affect players and their experience fighting the boss, potentially causing them to step away from the game out of frustration. I would recommend that either the Spikes would stay within the walkable field or not affect boss depths at all.
- Scaling for Monsters and how many Spikes they have should be adjusted. Speed/Attack/Defense increases should increase by 25% or lower, rather than 50% or higher. Similar to a Knight with Attack/Defense/Movement Increase Low per Spike. If it goes beyond 6 stacks, it should afflict a status to the Monster with a permanent status like Burn/Poison/Curse... As though it was overloading with power to self destruction.
- Retrodes can ignore interacting with Spike spawns
- Battle Pods might become more frustrating to deal with due to attack patterns and shield being faster.
- Spikes might spawn out of bounds and become unreachable. Possibly changing to only spawn only around where Monsters spawn or to adjust surrounding areas to fix this interaction.
- Appreciation for the Spike spawn rate being high in Arenas, even with the chaos embedded.

Non-Spike related:
- Appreciate for some option changes, including a BETA tab allowing you to, "Connect to Discord" and display extra details on where you are in-game + Network De-Jitter and Sound Refresh Rate. Hope these changes become permanent for the actual game down the line.

From my personal experience, I feel that this can be interesting to do as either a mode that's harder than Elite or an event that comes and goes with Apocrea/Black Kat/Tortodrones. I also have snippets from my Assault on Machine 13 run to show a few interactions between the Retrodes, Battle Pods, and some Spike spawn points. Overall, Veterans that consistently come back to the game would enjoy playing around with these Spikes 100%, but for newer players/Veterans that don't play as consistently, balancing changes are necessary.

So after about half an hour of trying to figure out how to get into here (a confused man trying to use a alt because people kept saying id lose my account if i used my steam account later) and several force log outs later whilst trying to test it, Here's my thoughts so far

From this point I'm just calling these "spikes" shards because as it stands, they seem more like shards that are obviously materializing from the energy storm and itself (and this is my theoretical opinion) is spewing out from the core or just from cradle itself but these are definitely more than just spikes.

Initial Observation though I seem to enjoy how the said "spikes" seem to work were pretty nice, the fact monsters can prioritize them first is a interesting thing and makes for racing to collect them first before the monsters can take advantage of them. but What the actual fuck am I watching man????? I get that these things can get stronger and faster but I swear the moment they get 2 shards in them, they start moving like they just injected every single drug in existence right into their brain and unlocked what a canon speedster would feel like being. I just watched a 2 shard mender and 3 shard lumber rock me with no mercy cause the attacks become near instantaneous. And were not even going to start with how mecha knights are with this. Other mobs too are just mental with these shards which is definitely a over tune thats I can tell is agreed upon

Now the elephant in the room aside with the buffs. They seem to be in pretty big quantities in construct related levels which is good i was atleast able to get about 200 huge shards just from one run , Though I'm curious as to what they will in turn be used for in the future, if they can be used as a alternative method to acquiring fire crystals or theres a special use we dont know yet which I hope these things dont just become a fire crystal alternative, I like the implementation of these so far. They feel like a nice addition especially with the fact you get 6 different shards for each stratum making it pretty easy for every player no matter their tier to get their hands on these and make use of them. Though i wont touch the placeholder shop for these much as... well 50 of them for each of these is definitely a interesting design. But I'm sure we'll get better shop choices for these shards later on.

Summary:
- Interesting yet nice addition that welcomes all players starting and old.
- Hellishly overtuned mob buffs when they acquire them making several monsters a nightmare to fight, I cannot imagine how much worse other monster families would be with this.
- Hopefully a special and real use for them outside of how they are right now.
- I'm kinda curious about the lore implications of these things especially especially with the dialogue we get regarding it

Something else to note is that I found myself finding these shards in starlight cradle even though the whole idea is that they are meant to be found in construct levels, is this intentional for them to show up randomly like that?

uhhhhhhhhh

https://i.imgur.com/9DTMY1a.mp4

is there a limit to how many you can give enemies? this doesn't feel right 😂

I've played a few runs, and so far I can say, I have some mixed feelings about this new addition.
That is not to say I'm against having harder enemies, and I'm actually feeling quite hopeful for where the development is headed; But there is a lot that still needs to be addressed, and I feel at best skeptical about the current implementation.
At the moment, my main gripes are that:

• The damage on the roided up enemies is just another insult to the already almost useless player armour stat. This has been a problem for a while now, but with this level of damage, the player's "Sonic mode" gets tripped off on pretty much the first hit always, even if it's blocked by a shield, that shield gets destroyed too along with your entire health bar.
• On top of that, enemies also build up status resistances and flinching resistance which damages gameplay variety while forcing players to prioritise raw damage.

Basically this update wants the player to go all-in on glass cannon builds, which have already been a plague on the meta for years before.

My personal request is that the scaling of multiple stacked crystals should be toned down. It feels like the enemies get buffed exponentially, and perhaps it could be more gradual? or maybe even diminish over time, so as to set a certain soft-cap on the absurd enemy strength. Otherwise, I feel like the whole aurora thing would work way better off as a temporary event, similar to Golden Slime Casino, that way the sudden difficulty spike will feel way less impactful on the more casual day-to-day gameplay.

The next few points will mostly be nitpicks about the visual implementation of the spikes, and how they look way out of place for the game in my opinion. These points are less important, so I'm writing them in a separate list:

• First off, I'm surprised that the aurora, and the shards are colored brightly yellow, instead of light blue, since light blue has always been the signature "Energy colour" in the worldbuilding of Spiral Knights, while also having been stated to grant strength to creatures that encapsulate it. It just feels like it would make way more sense in my opinion. I don't deny that monster spikes could also be attributed to each of the 6 monster families, and that the yellow colour actually represents the construct family. If that is the case, this point can be disregarded.
• Another thing I want to point out is that the way these spikes/shards appear in the overworld looks way out of place with everything else. I'm not saying it looks bad, I'm just saying that none of the other drops or materials have EVER had a 3D pickup model before, aside from Crowns and Winterfest presents. In the current state, I feel like Spikes should appear in their "item icon" form when dropped by enemies on the ground, and play the appropriate pickup sound too. If they're going to stay as 3D models, then I feel like in the future every crafting material and monster drop should have to to adapt to this new visual style as well, and get a 3D model too instead of the current 2D icons that we have.

That is all I have to say for now, thank you for reading, take care.

So I did a few levels and found myself purposefully feeding spikess to a lumber. It was entertaining to see them go fast but it was tanky and I think immune to knock back at 19 spikes. I think there should be a cap of how many shard enemies can aquire, perhap depending on size, like like dust bunniess can only get one and lumbers can get 5?

The othe issue is how they spawn, in a deconstruction zone most of the enemies are all ready spawned so many of them already had shards, not sure if thats the intention but you can suddenly have strong enemy right as you start the level.

The main problem I'm seeing is the sheer speed, on a lumber this is fun and interesting but this would be awefull on greavers or devilites.

A surgebot with 3 stacks has animations faster than a brandish with ASI very high, you can imagine how horrible it was to face two mecha knights with 10 stacks each. not only they oneshot you, they run at mach 67, they also take an insane amount of punishment before going down. the most spikes I've encountered on a single enemy is 24 on a gremlin thwacker, and its movement was more akin to teleportation than running.
shards per enemy MUST be limited to 5 at most, the defenses not being affected by them, and still the rewards for gathering spikes must be greater than a couple fire crystals to make them an interesting challenge rather than a nuisance. content that warrants using more sparks of life in a D27 arena than a Shadow Lair is not something I'd like to see implemented

I am returning to agree with everyone here that Spikes should absolutely not be able to increase enemy abilities without limit - but I do also want to say that I think allowing one enemy to pick up as many spikes as they like to no additional effect should stay in. I have this funny feeling it might become part of some players' strategies, to let one enemy they know they can handle carry as many as possible so they remain out of the hands of something that can do more damage. Little avenues of player expression seem meaningful to me and it's probably worth mentioning it here in case it's of value to anyone else - player or GM alike.

holy $#%! it sucked. on top of regular enemies being absolute tanks that oneshot you, the BOSS picked up spikes, which messed up regular attack phases, prolonging the battle needlessly and put me and my buddy in situations where we could not avoid taking damage. PLEASE disable the spikes in shadow lairs altogether, on top of already suggested nerfs to them

When a Game is easy DPS is King, when is Hard CC rules above... Bombs Level the game when Spikes 'Spike' an enemy... This is Fun to see because 3* shields doesn't last... well it was obvious, DPS is not enough well is obvious... We need to review out strategy. And That's Good and interesting.

This proves that Venom Veiler needs to have Stronger Venom, that helps a lot with Spiked enemies and currently it's severely outclased by Barriers, Vials state is ok, because are not Persistent, but Barriers are.

This also proves the Stagger Storm needs to be checked because the stun is helpful against "fast robots". But Stun is not Strong enough when the enemies have "lots of spikes". Big Angry Bomb, Irontech Destroyer are not as reliable inflicting stun, though they can clear space for You to move against some enemies (Mecha Knights)

Voltaic tempest Can stunlock groups, But! this is something I've notice Spiked enemies don't get Strong Damage from the Shock, they get Normal... which is Interesting. And makes You Wonder if Shock damage Should be increase by +2?(particulary because there is not Reliable form to apply shock before 3 stars in a ziseable area so it wouldn't become overwhelming at lower depths)

I keep the Initial analysis, I like a lot this to replace Fire crystals in drop boxes on Arcade levels, Shankles and Wisps behaviour change is AMAZING!
But Spike scaling Doesn't need to be lineal, I want to stress this.

On a next itteration, The depot could have the Weapons and Armours at 1 crown/energy so we can try other weapons and addapt, since several players only have 2 sets and 3~4 Weapons? after all is erased... but testing this changes with weapons that change spawns and moster behaviour in different ways require Different Tools... Thanks again for Throwing a Spike at the meta and Shatter it.

Positive feedback:
I like the aesthetic effect on the clockworks and levels, the golden aurora is very pretty and a nice way to highlight that the level/monsters have a special modifier

Neutral feedback:
The gameplay of spikes is somewhat interesting if mechanically simple - they just make existing mobs super fast and tanky. There are some specific edge cases where this creates unmanageable problems (ie, a Spiked Mechaknight doing its moving/pursuit charge attack is basically unavoidable and will delete all your health and shield values if not stopped with a shivermist or something). I would place a hard cap on how fast monsters can get with spikes, or limit how many spikes one monster can have at once - it gets a bit absurd once one has too many.

Negative feedback:
Rewards, and reward rates, are obscenely bad, especially for something which can rapidly snowball into forcing party revives.

The only item of real value on offer is Radiant Fire Crystals, and 50 Huge spikes for ONE SINGULAR RAD is just insane. The game already hoses Shining Crystals at you, which can be easily broken down into other crystals as needed, so none of the other crystal offerings are really relevant. Getting, quite literally, an extra four or five rads per run as a reward for an increased difficulty modifier is catastrophically abysmal and will just make this content dead on arrival. I would greatly increase the rewards offered and/or put something else in the reward shop.

I'm sure what I'm going to say has already been said. I personally loved the change of pace, but this certainly feels like a beta feature that needs refinement. Thank you for bringing back the test server for it!

General feedback:

1. Spikes should be limited to 3 per enemy.

More than 3 is unnecessary, and 3 per allows more enemies to get powered up. Alternatively, have monster tiers be the limit, so a lumber can get 5 while a scuttlebot only 3.

2. Spikes should only affect construct monsters

While other monsters are funny, 3 shards in a greaver was basically unavoidable damage. Constructs are slow and predictable, so these spikes work very well with them.

3. Make spikes Arcade-only.

Spikes in missions is fun when you want them, but if it was someone's first Roarmulus Twins run, that's no good. Arcade exclusivity ensures you're intentionally going for the challenge.

4. Difficulty should affect spike spawns

I only played on elite, but I felt like more spikes would have been fine when playing normally. Having 50 on average per level on elite would be ideal, with smaller amounts on lower difficulties (maybe 35 on advanced, 20 on normal)

5. Reduce the damage of crystal buffs

The current system basically equalizes glass cannon and defensive armor. Reducing the damage output slightly, alongside the crystal limits, should give defensive sets a bit of an edge. The speed, health, and attack speed increases are fine.

Some extra things that happened - I loaded up a Lumber with 40 spikes. He was literally teleporting, but it took over 5 minutes to kill him. Greaver and Trojans were just disgusting - I don't think if you're solo that it would be possible to kill a Trojan after a certain point. Mecha knights hit really hard when souped up, but when too fast they kinda just orbit around you.

If we must have infinitely stacking crystals, I think the monster should have a perpetual fire status inflicted on them. The strength of the status increases the more spikes they have. This would allow them to get really strong but put them on a timer. Make sure the fire is inflicted any time it's lost so that freeze can't remove the fire. Think of it like them being overclocked.

Overall, I really enjoyed the test last night. I'll try it some more (especially with Ghosts in the Machine being today), but I have a good first impression of the concept. I'd also like to say that, if this whole thing was an elite difficulty modifier, it would be really effective at actually making a level harder instead of just buffing the monsters and nerfing the player. Something similar for every monster family could completely revamp the game's future.

I see @Fangel's proposal to limit spikes to only 3, I think this goes against the whole interest of these. Let's not forget these are traded against fire crystals atm, which makes obtaining these crystals a lot less painful, especially the higher tier crystals. Let's not ruin the utility here by limiting spike spawns and carry capcity too much.

Additionally, I am of the opinion that many spikes on some monsters makes for a very welcome and fun challenge, a lumber or mecha knight with 12-20 spikes gives the squad an effective miniboss. It's fun to come up with new ways to fight familiar monsters!

And at no time in my testing did I accidentally load up any monster with 40 spikes, that seems very intentional. One could argue that it being possible is not good, but it's still quite rare, and deliberate.

I'll preface that this is my first time on the Preview Server. So far, I love the concept of new power-scaling enemies, and defeating them netting bonus rewards (which, admittedly, feel lacking in terms of exchange rates, but I haven't done the math). The method/concept with a golden energy aurora is a very cool effect, and I'm sure the art/design of the spikes might get a bit of fine tuning too, which I'm looking forward to.

I've only played around a little bit so far, so I don't have the breadth of variety or feedback as others. But I do have a few ideas to tune the new gameplay, which could be used together or independently of each other:

1. Spike Effect Cap: If the effects of the Spikes stay the same, then there should be a limit on either how many an enemy can collect or how many actually provide an effect to them. This would keep an enemy from becoming totally game breaking, whether it be their hyper-sonic movement or HP scaling to that beyond bosses. This change would also then opt for more enemies to collect Spikes to become a stronger horde, rather than a bunch of standard enemies with an poorly scaled Raidboss alongside them.

2. Scaling Spike Effect Rework A: Diminishing returns on Spike bonuses, as mentioned by other users thus far. The bonus would be strong on the first pickup, similar to what it is now, but further pickups would not scale as high, resulting in still lethal but less monstrously power-scaled enemy.

3. Scaling Spike Effect Rework B: The inverse of the last one: Scaling Spike Bonuses. The idea with this is that enemies would start with small bonuses at first, but leaving an enemy alone to collect more would then start to drastically scale it, to the point it eventually becomes a miniboss. The difference here is the rate at which the enemy scales; rather than diminishing the end, it reduces the ramp up to becoming overpowered, giving players time to stop the enemy first.

4. Timed Spike Effects: Any Spike after the first pickup could come with a timer until it falls off the enemy. This would give any players struggling with an enemy with a significant number of Spikes the chance to reduce the enemy's power level a little bit to make it easier to deal with. An enemy picking up a new Spike would reset the timer, but the more Spikes they have, the lower the Timer value until a Spike falls off.

5. Variety Spikes: I feel like the effect of the Spikes on enemies is similar to the Pick-ups that players can get, buffing movement/damage/defense. I wondered if, instead of one Spike scaling all of these for enemies, if different colored Spikes could each have one of the bonuses? And enemies would scale based on which Spikes they've picked up. If spikes remain as Materials instead of Tokens, this might also lead to an issue (or opportunity!) for different material types, and potentially more rewards or ways to purchase rewards based on the colored Spikes collected.

The Spikes in general would feel very out of place if they randomly appeared in mission levels. Except for maybe a few missions where it's pre-planned, I would expect Spike Energy surges to occur randomly in the Clockworks and rotate every day, similar to the Gates. Maybe on top of this, each Spike Energy surge would only effect one/two monster family types in the designated Stratum/Gate? It would get insanely hectic in an Arena if every single enemy type could pick up the Spikes, for example, but I'm not sure if that's part of the intended goal with this update. Regardless, looking forward to what's next!

The Monster Spikes are definitely a fun new mechanic, some quirks to be ironed for sure though.

In areas with respawn pads for the monsters a player can get infinite spikes at least in Roarmulus Twins boss room, you can lay idle and they twins will farm spikes for you to pick up when you decide to revive.

Recommend keeping the Monster Spikes to Arcade only rather than in missions, that seemed to be the direction of the new mechanic with the new NPC's being in Arcade, this would be a good move to make Arcade more engaging. #Arcade Redux Rotating monster families effected by Monster Spikes weekly is the ideal routine, please don't make this as rare as other rotating events such as Black Kat or Apocrea. Different Variant Spikes would be entertaining assuming this will change over time having a variant for speed, damage, and health. Though health shouldn't increase much, existing enemies with bigger health bars isn't fun, takes more time to do the same thing.

Spikes on monsters could use a cap but it shouldn't be necessary, a monster should only get 3+ spikes if the player is doing it intentionally and if they are then they should accept the consequences lol. If players wanna make a Lumber so fast he can teleport I say let it happen, normal gameplay it shouldn't happen naturally.

Not sure if the fire crystals are the final reward intended for "Monster Spikes" but if they are I'd suggest finding a different reward for these new tokens.

Just to preface this: I think this is a very fun idea and has the potential to be a really positive addition to the game. Some sort of rolling/temporary difficulty buff is a way to shake up the flow of gameplay, especially for experienced players. I have a couple of points, however:

- Sorta tagging onto what Exelius said, I think this should be something more exclusive to the Arcade. Arcade has, unfortunately, been a rather dead game mode for some time now, especially amongst experienced players. The payout for farming it, in comparison to the time taken to farm it, makes Arcade running uneconomical. Other farming methods exist and have higher payouts, leaving Arcade farming as something you only really do for obtaining recipes, or during one of the seasonal events when you're looking for particular scenario rooms. Limiting the Spikes to appearing in Arcade runs can incentivise players into running the Arcade gates.

- Expanding on this, I think making this a rotating buff that's constantly active would help pad some of the downtime between seasonal and rotational events like the Dark Harvest, Apocrea, Tortos and Winterfest, as well as give people the choice of whether or not they want to engage with the event. Limiting it to a couple of gates at a time (or even just a single gate) allows people to make the choice as to whether they want this difficulty modifier active during things like recipe runs or even Shadow Lairs. The gate itself could rotate every day, with a weekly rotation of the monster family affected, just as an idea.

- Leading on from that: The rewards. I'm assuming that the fire crystals in the shop are placeholders, considering the vast disparity between how many tokens they cost and what you get in return. That being said, in order to make people want to farm this, the rewards need to be worth dedicating time to running Arcade instead of more economical farming methods. The novelty of it will get people to farm it initially, but to make this have any staying power, there needs to be a powerful incentive to choose this as a farm method. An alternative farming method outside of Vanaduke is something a lot of people have been clamouring for as is - Delivering on this will be a positive change for the health of the game in the long run.

- Tuning. I won't spent too long on this, as most people have already brought this up, but the buffs the spikes provide are a little bit over-tuned. Whilst having a powerful punishment provides a disincentive from just cheesing an enemy into picking up a lot of spikes and then killing said enemy for a large payout, I think maybe the buffs could be a bit more gradual in their accumulation to counter the rather significant difficulty spike that comes from just two or three spikes. This would make the modifier a bit more approachable for newer players.

- Finally, I'd suggest evaluating whether bosses can be spiked too. In the case of Roarmulus Twins, the spikes cannot really be countered, as they spawn out beyond the platform. Both twins can accumulate spikes separately, and if players don't kill the twins fast enough the fight can quickly spiral out of control. These spikes were how I found out the lasers on the twins work on a timer instead of being dependent on a twin's position - Allowing for the twins to quickly swipe the lasers across the arena and get a cheap hit on an unsuspecting player.

Overall, though, I've had a lot of fun with how hectic this can get, and I really do think this has the potential to be an overall positive change in the long-run.

I agree that 50 spikes for crystals is pretty INSANE, knowing a single strata often doesn't even grant 100 spikes, if 50 is a SINGLE crystal, that's miserable and just adds more grind to an already unbearably grindy game loop.

Playing with it a bit more, I think I've come to the understanding that spikes spawn are directly related to enemy spawns. While this is fine in most levels, I was able to infinitely farm them from the left side room of Ghosts in the Machine where there are infinitely spawning bombies. I got up to 239 in that level alone before I had to go do other things.

I think that having spikes spawn alongside enemies is a good idea, but there should be some weight to it. Compounds get a lot of spikes from all the minis spawning, and while I'm all for boosting rewards in compounds, the difficulty increase is just making a dreaded level type even worse.

It might be wiser to have spikes spawns be related to constructs that are currently aggro'd. This lets spikes spawn in combat, but won't make enemies scattered across levels like deconstruction zones be overwhelmed with spikes. Compounds and arenas would not be overwhelming, and it makes longer fights more interesting. You can also have more control over how many spikes are spawning, so you can reduce their spawn rate after you hit the desired amount per level.

My thoughts: have it so each construct that's currently aggro'd gives 1 charge per second. Every 30 charges, a spike spawns. Every 3 spikes spawned, spikes go on a spawn cooldown of 30 seconds. Once the target spawns have been hit, the spikes double the required charges each time the cooldown is hit.

So for example, you have 15 scuttlebots spawn. After they all aggro on you, 2 seconds pass a spike spawns. After 6 seconds, 3 spikes are on the field and you must wait 30s for more to spawn. After 50 spikes have spawned in the level, if you still have those 15 constructs, it will take 12 seconds to spawn, then 24, then 48, etc. It would let spikes spawn indefinitely, but not make it worth your time to idle.

Obviously these numbers can be tweaked, but it's a good visualization of the idea.

The spikes are the only drop in the game that's renewable. All other loot is limited, or has a cost. I think it's important to have spikes be limited in their spawns otherwise their spawns will be exploited and devalued. If they are permanently respawning, it needs to not be worthwhile to exploit.

After few more arcade runs I have more to say about the spikes.

Things to note

First off something I've noticed is that enemies become fundamentally broken at high quantities of spikes, not broken as overpowered but they seems the enemy progaming breaks, the can't seem to path to you correctly at close distances and can't seem to collect more spikes, here are some tests: Gremlin , Mecha Knight.

The speed aspect of the buff is the most interesting but also the most problematic, 2-3 spikes adds a good challenge but once you get to like maybe 7 spikes they go from being way to strong to completely buggy like in the videos from before.

On topic of enemies getting spikes some enemies benefit more from increased stack of spikes (until they begin to bug out). From my testing mecha knights seem to become the most dangerous in my experience so far as they can now quickly catch up to the player when using their charge attack, this might be the same for greavers. I still need to test it on more enemy since you can see them all in the compounds (interested in how drops and gorgoes react as their attacks track the player).

My impression of spike mechanic so far is "lol look at lumber go fast" or a mecha knight suddenly going "Omae wa mou shindeiru" right behind me. It funny and memeable at high spikes or brutal with specific enemies. The other thing is turrets can't get spikes easily unless it spawn on them or spiked enemies dies next to them or where turret will spawn. The only exception is howlitzer when it dies the head can pick up spikes which could lead the spikes becoming unreachable.

As for combating the spiked enemies, I just find myself spamming winter grave more (maybe I'm just bad at the game). My current strategy for dealing with spikes is making sure to grab them before the enemies can and if I am in situation with several enemies with multiple stacks of spikes is too kite them with winter grave as much possible. Using melee feels completely discouraged, sure you can collect the spikes easier when defeat ing an enemy but with multiple spikes that is simply too risky. With range weapons, enemies are far more likely to pick it the spikes that others drop but eventually at enough spikes that ironically make them easier to manage when their pathing bugs out. Regardless the overall current vibe of spikes is don't let the enemies get them in the first place, its just punishment that can usually be avoided or minimized this might be easier with more players in a party (except for deconstruction zones where all the enemies will get the spikes before you even step on the party button).

In terms of the rewards they will have to be better than fire crystals, this immediately makes the lower tiers of spikes absolutely worthless as everything but radiants can be crafted down. Would be great to add orbs and other rarity types items to add another option to farm them. I really do hope fire crystals are just a place holder.

Feedback

• First something needs to be done about the enemy's speed, they aren't programmed to go that fast, they either need to function at sonic speed and tear me to pieces or limit there speed to where they still function properly.

• Secondly there has to be away to opt in or out of spikes appearing in levels or not have them appear in all construct themed all the times, a weather system that @Vyre-Acidlashed sound great for that, just have a certain rotation of tier or strata where the gate glows yellow or something (expanding to more that just constructs levels)

Suggestions

I have diffent suggestions of how addressing the issues with enemies and spikes stack regarding rewarded spike and keeping the buffs in check, all of these suggestion require tunning to make the buffs reasonable.

1. The simplest solution, just have a cap on how many spikes an enemy can acquire and/or make the buffs give diminishing returns.
2. Have the spikes cap at four stack but the buffs double with each spike as well as the spike double the spikes dropped (1 spike 1 buff 1 spike dropped, 2 spikes 2, 3 spikes 4 buff 4 dropped, 4 spikes 8 buffs 8 dropped.
3. Addinga spike cap but having the spikes on an enemy grow over time, giving the choice to remove the threat early or let it grow for more reward, less spikes will spawn on the ground to insure it doesn't get out of control too fast.
4. have spikes spawn as enemies are defeated instead, basically add spikes to their drop pool to prevent up from farming respawnable enemies

As for how spikes should spawn in levels, the weather system mentioned before is a good idea, the other options could include having a giant spike forming throught out levels or next too party buttons then interacting with it would start having spikes form through out the stage or maybe add a legendary difficulty which adds the spike spawns to any gate or mission.

Final Thoughts

Overall I like the new mechanic, it refreshing to have something new after all this time. However it does seem a bit crude, the most notable part is health because damage wise we getting 2 shot after just 2-3 stacks and the speed eventually breaks the game. Like I get it that its probably not the intention for any enemy to get 10 or 20 stacks but that's been my experience when kiting groups. Would like 2 see something different that make us change how we fight an enemies not let me see how many blitz needle or winter graves charge shots it take to get to the center of lumber with 10 spikes. Something new like giving them energy orbs orbiting around them or a special AoE attack, a good few elite enemies we can choose to take the risk on creating for good rewards instead everything just get roided up. I'd also like to see this getting us more buff that we can earn though this, it been while since out knights got any sort of boost in a while.

I went in more or less blind. I skim read the brief about the test, loaded it up and had a go.

My first impression still stands now, the difficulty boost is fun and reasonable most of the time, but I quickly noted that enemies (darkfang thwackers mainly but a retrode too) with too many shards would move erratically and rarely attack. This is not something I expect to see often though given it took 10 shards for behaviour to notably break and 15-20 for the monsters to stop fighting altogether.

Some things felt a bit off though:
(anyone know how to put bullet points in?)
Jigsaw valley was what I expected to see, some monsters boosted by shards and a few that were annoying enough for me to use my whole arsenal against. Some clockwork tunnels were the same, all good in my eyes. But deconstruction zones and compounds ended up with almost every enemy I saw having 1 or more spikes which sort of took away the novelty and unique threat they showed in other floors. I would have preferred it if I encountered say 1 in 5 enemies having many spikes than just a sea of buffed monsters.
Given the power spikes seem to give, the option to use them as a consumable for a temporary buff would be handy. (I don't know why they are on the item bar unless it's planned or if they just show there so we can tell how many we find in a floor while on the preview)
The spikes also look odd, when they appear it looks fine, but on monsters or dropped on the ground they look uncannily different to anything else in the game aside from maybe some of the crystals in apocrea.
Spiked enemies seem to have no good counter. From what I could see, stun only brings them to normal or faster than normal speeds. Freeze still works but enemies seem to have flinch/knockdown resistance. In general this has left me without an option if say I'm in a freeze level and see shards spawning (If somebody knows a good way to deal with enemies with high shards it would be appreciated)
I don't think spikes should spawn in missions as arcade needs something new and it can make players less motivated if they struggle on spiked enemies.

Given the rewards seem to be placeholders, I won't comment on them, beyond that, spikes seem to be a very good feature.